Games @sh.itjust.works nanoUFO @sh.itjust.works 7 mo. ago

'Today is the end of Steam': Argentina and Turkey floored by new Steam price hikes as high as 2900%

www.pcgamer.com 'Today is the end of Steam': Argentina and Turkey floored by new Steam price hikes as high as 2900%

Steam's new pricing policy for Latin America and the MENA region came in yesterday.

30 comments

From u/fablegrimoire,

"Gamedev here. This is NOT normal. I suspect a bug happened on Valve's side.

EDIT: checked our Steam email again: "If you do not add a USD price to these columns for your game before November 20th, we will default to the standard USD pricing you already have in Steamworks.", seems like manual input was explicitly needed after all, but I'm not the only dev who missed it apparently.

Here's a summary of what happened:

Last month, Steam notified all devs and publishers of the price change Steam automatically suggested prices for LATAM and MENA (mostly half the USA price) Through the Steam pricing tool, devs can manually override the suggestion with another price We manually lowered the price to our 2nd game, but let Steam decide for our 1st game ($12.49) Come today, and through Steamdb, we see that Steam did NOT apply its own suggested price for our 1st game. Instead it applied USA price (24.99). We still see the halved, Steam-suggested $12.49 price in our pricing tool.

Game developers are now discovering this and are hurriedly manually changing the prices to make it fairer to LATAM and MENA regions. We just did that and are waiting for Valve to approve the change.

I promise that outside of AAA publishers like EA, almost no game developer wanted this to happen. We're aware that this is counter-intuitive and we know it won't help with sales (or our reputation) at all."
- Thanks for the clarification! It wouldn't make sense for Valve to make a scummy move like this.
- Considering that Steam now requires for manual input for the prices for different regions, is there a tool that a) lists these regions and b) calculates the median suggested pricing for these regions in comparison to the region you (the developer) is based in?
  
  I know an excel sheet would probably be a good start, but considering that therevare also developers in regions other than EU (€) and US ($), it would be a tremendous help to be able to input a price you have in mind, in your own currency, and have the prices calculated in other currencies in the respective regions.
  
  Steam's price settings page already has a very convenient Recommended Prices button that sets your game's price to what Valve estimates would be okay for that region. For most devs, that's perfectly adequate. Valve already did the homework so devs don't have to.
  
  Publishers that would want to charge more would likely just set the USA price anyway and forgo regional pricing.
  
  And if you want to charge less than the recommended price, while appreciated, why?
  
  I think there are some excel sheets that can do that
- I mean even if you didn't want that to happen its still nither your nor valves fault, valve needs to have company security, and dealing with money thats essentially worthless is a high risk for them, defaulting to USD prices was the only option for both countries to continue running the steam store at all there, otherwise they probably would have to shut it down there.
By the way Steam added regional pricing in many countries today. For the first time ever we finally got acknowledged as a poor market. Games that are $60 are $35 here.
Feels like any dev who wants to use the regional pricing will have more work now and before the change. This was probably done in favor of big publishers who treat the regional price as a small discount instead of a fair price.
How's capitalism treating you, Argentina? (Context: They just elected an an-cap)
- They are about to discover that "small government" ends up being "big corpo"
Yea,Turkish person here, had to teach a few friends how to pirate
Thanks to abusers from EU and US 🙏

Abusers downvoting lol
- Uh no?
  
  The goal, Valve said back in October, is to prevent game developers from having to constantly adjust their prices to keep up with the stunning volatility of the Turkish and Argentine currencies. Instead, they ought to be able to set a regionally appropriate price in USD and forget about it.
  
  Thanks to terrible governance by Argentina and Turkey.
  
  If the intent was to keep up with inflation in a way that maximizes local profits, pegging to the US dollar makes no sense. The games wont sell at this price in any appreciable number. Steam could have easily used other tools, like some dynamic pricing model, to maximize local profits. The only thing pegging to the US dollar does is combat key resales, as the comment you are replying to implies.
  
  Thats an excuse. I don’t know about Argentina side but we had fair prices. Not too low, not too high.
  
  Steam wasn’t giving a shit about Turkey before people abused or complained about it.
  
  Also Dollar/Lira is in 1/28 rate for like 6 months. It wasn’t volatile as article says.
  
  Do I care? Not anymore. I’ll either go with Epic or piracy unfortunately. I can’t pay $60/70 to a game when my salary is not even $400.
- Just pirate bud, literally no one cares if you do
- Lol you fuckhead
  
  You’re very kind.

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